A New Dawn For Brand Deals
by Migratory Housefly
Summary: As he slowly recovers in the hospital, Commander Shepard that the Alliance has once again not been entirely honest with him. Post-Destroy Ending, Shepard Lives. Ongoing.
1. Chapter 1

Shepard woke up with a lot of questions, terrifying a nurse refilling his IV who had done nothing to deserve this.

Over the course of the next few hours, in between doses of sedatives, he managed to harangue his caretakers into giving him a loose understanding of the world outside the red haze of his head, though it took a bit of sorting through the bits and pieces they gave him:

1\. The Reapers were all dead

2\. Tali was alive, and had in fact visited him earlier that day

3\. Yes, they were going to get her

4\. He had been in a coma for a few months, and would have to stay in the hospital for quite some time to recover properly

5\. Everything was going to be okay

6\. The Reapers were still dead

7\. Please, sir, try not to exert yourself

* * *

That was a while ago. Things had gotten marginally more sensible since then. He'd been moved to a nicer room in the hospital, the sort with fake plants that still look dead, and with treatment and therapy he was getting physically well enough to want to bang his head against the wall from boredom, which the doctors said was an improvement.

He at least had plenty of people to talk to. Tali visited every day, and stayed every night she managed to hide from the nurse staff. Practically all of his former squadmates had visited him to express varying degrees of astonishment that he was still alive. And then of course there was a constant stream of various alliance officials, the vast majority of whom he suspected were just making up excuses to visit him so they could puff out their chests and say they had.

But today, there was Admiral Hackett, standing in front of his hospital bed and, still unusually, in the flesh. This was an event.

The Alliance Navy's officer training academy liked to talk about its holy triumvirate of "intelligence, sobriety, and reliability", but the difference between hearing that ideal and actually meeting Admiral Hackett was the difference between seeing a picture of the ocean and drowning in it. In all the years Shepard had worked with him he had only seen Hackett either calmly professional or mildly cynical, with not even rumors of a third emotion. Shepard's relationship with him was based mainly on a series of concise and sensible instructions all ending in "Hackett out." There was a theory, common among Alliance recruits, that there was no such thing as an "Admiral Hackett", just a very thinly disguised AI.

So the sight of Hackett, one hand occasionally pinching the bridge of his nose, staring intently at a point slightly to the right of Shepard's head, was slightly unnerving. The man actually seemed uncomfortable. It was like watching a mountain squirm.

"Commander," he said. "This is a conversation that we should have had a long time ago. I've tried to keep you out of a lot of mess- the Alliance's mess- thinking I could fix it myself. Unfortunately, that's no longer the case." He paused. "Things have gotten... stupid."

"What exactly is wrong, Admiral?" Shepard asked, trying to meet Hackett's stare unsuccessfully.

Hackett didn't seem to know where to start. Before he could, the door slid open, and in walked Tali, accompanied by a volus Shepard didn't recognize. A motorized thing that looked like a large briefcase on wheels trundled along behind the volus of its own accord.

"Shepard," Tali said, walking up to his bedside and giving his hand a squeeze. "This volus followed me here; he says he has business with you."

"Yes, he's-" Hackett began, but was cut off.

"Hello. It's nice to finally meet you, Commander Shepard," the volus said. "My name is Jerro Gan. I'm your lawyer."

"What?" said Shepard, who by now was feeling somewhat alarmed. He looked at Tali, who seemed just as surprised as him, and back to Hackett, who didn't. "Am I being accused of something?"

"No. That would be a lot simpler," Hackett said. He glared at the volus. "And I thought I ordered you to wait in the lobby until you were called."

"You requested. I didn't listen to that request," Jerro said, waving a stubby arm dismissively. "I think it's important that my client have representation present."

"Why does he need a lawyer?" Tali said, sounding both confused and indignant. She glanced down at Shepard. "When did you _get_ a lawyer?"

"Let me explain," Admiral Hackett said, returning to his current default posture of hand on nose, eyes focused in the middle distance. "Commander, you were extremely heavily injured and in a coma for a little over four months. You were recovering and the outlook by the doctors seemed to be generally positive once we were past the first post, but it was obvious to most of us that, if you were ever going to return to active duty, it wouldn't be anytime soon."

"I still haven't-" Shepard began, but this time Hackett cut him off.

"I'm not here to bang the recruiting drum, Commander. If you decide you want an honorable discharge you'll get it no questions asked, along with an Admiral's pension. God knows you've earned it," he said. "But we figured you were going to spend a long time in recovery either way, even once you get out of this hospital. And right now the Alliance doesn't really need commando raids or deep-space espionage. We need support. Contracts, trade deals, donations, bodies, just generally enough people working together so that we don't collapse in on ourselves right after winning the war. And you happen to be the most famous human in the galaxy. So we figured, once you were allowed out of the hospital, that we would ask you for a little show of support. Interviews, speeches, talk shows, that sort of thing. Just going around telling your story and asking people to support the Alliance."

Shepard started to relax. "Well if that's all, then I suppose I would be happy to help."

Hackett sighed. "Yes, we knew you would be happy to help, Shepard. That's where it all began to go wrong."

"You see, some of my staff decided that you'd obviously say yes, and figured we should plan ahead. Pre-arrange interviews, put diplomatic visits on a floating schedule, put a few soldiers on standby for your escort." Hackett paused, and shifted uncomfortably. "They also figured it would be best if you came back from your injuries... looking well. So they wanted to let the doctors give you some non-invasive but not necessarily life-saving treatments, mainly to keep down scarring."

"And I want to point out that my client did not consent to these procedures," Jerro said.

"Hey, we're not complaining," Tali said. She squeezed his hand again, and Shepard recalled an occasion where she had drunkenly explained her fondness for his skin for almost twenty minutes. There had been a lot of words that didn't translate properly.

"Even so," the lawyer said, but his heart didn't sound in it. He was leaning over his motorized briefcase fiddling with some sort of latch, and seemed like he was only arguing the point out of deep-seated reflex.

After a second, he grunted approvingly, and the briefcase unfolded upwards into a miniature desk, complete with computer terminal, at just the right height for a standing volus. "Alright then," he said, flicking a switch on the terminal, "Get on with it."

Hackett shook his head. "My first mistake was letting them go ahead with the project. My second mistake was not supervising them. My third, and most significant, was giving them all the time they needed."

"Did they not get it done?" Tali said.

"No, they found the opposite problem," Hackett said looking at Tali. Somehow it seemed that he found it easier to look her in the eye than Shepard. "They planned the Commander a full diplomatic calendar, all the details worked out. That took them the better part of a day. Then..."

He sighed. "All right. This will be a lot easier to understand if you just show them," he said. He looked Shepard in the eye properly for the first time. "I hope you can understand," he said.

The volus inhaled sharply, and opened a small drawer on his desk. He pulled a small can out, slowly walked up to Shepard's bedside, and solemnly pressed it into his hand.

Shepard looked at the label:

 ** _N7 COLA_**

 _Commander Shepard's Favorite!_

" _After I'm done saving the galaxy, there's nothing more refreshing than a cold drink."_

* * *

After Tali managed to stop laughing, Hackett continued with his explanation.

"By the time I caught up with them, those idiots had given the rights to your image to no less than three dozen different companies for branding purposes," he said. "They had somehow managed to get it into their heads that the point of the project was to increase awareness of you by any means possible, and given the amount of time they had on their hands they found some extremely creative ways."

"So there are billboards with my face on them all over the galaxy?" Shepard asked, bewildered. Tali snorted, but remained standing this time.

"No. Not yet, at least," Hackett said. "Eventually I looked back in, and when I did I had everybody involved transferred to rubble-clearing duty on Mars. But by that point it was all out of control, and that's when your lawyer got in contact with me."

"Yeah, I've been meaning to ask about that," Shepard said, looking at the volus standing innocently behind his rolling desk. "Who are you? You weren't there when I was court-martialed. "

"Not a defense advocate," Jerro said. He fiddled with his computer, and a holographic display shone above it for the benefit of the feeble non-lawyers on the other side of the desk. He began flicking through a series of documents with important-looking seals on them, the sort that the professionally educated hang on their walls to prove their credentials in full certainty that nobody's ever going to read them.

"Jerro Gan, Doctor of Law, Lenos University," he said, pausing at one document that was apparently supposed to prove this. "Independent practice, specialty in copyright and intellectual property."

He took a deep breath. "About three years ago, I was contacted by a human agent, affiliated with an obvious shell corporation, who had an interesting proposal regarding you, Commander Shepard. You were believed dead and any sensible court would call you a public figure, so under common Council copyright law any interested party would assume that they could make use of your image in whatever way they pleased. But, though means they chose not to reveal, this shell corporation had obtained security rights to your image- which they wanted to exercise through me. They set up a well-funded trust to automatically pay me twice my normal fee for dealing with cases involving your name and image."

He stared up at Shepard owlishly. "Generally speaking, they wanted me to sue the hell out of anything depicting you in a negative light."

"Cerberus," Shepard said automatically. It made sense. Half the reason that Cerberus had sunk billions of credits into rebuilding him was his fame; it made sense to budget for public relations.

"I see that you can put two and two together just as well as I could, Commander Shepard," Jerro said. "But it was all legal and not terribly unethical from my end, so I took the offer. Credits are credits."

"Why would Cerberus hire a volus lawyer?" Tali asked.

"I gather that most human cultures consider lawyers evil by default," Jerro said, with what passed for a shrug in a species with no shoulders. "Apparently they don't distinguish between human evil and alien evil. And I happen to be very good at my job."

Jerro started flicking through more pictures for Shepard's apparent benefit again. "I spent around two years under the nominal supervision of the shell corporation, keeping my feelers out. Most of what I found was just cheap merchandise. There was a line of novelty shirts saying 'First Human Spectre- Dead in Half a Year'"- an image of a stall in a shop came up, and Shepard noted the unflattering caricature of him with half his face missing- "which was popular with certain Turian and Krogan demographics. I don't know why; they couldn't even fit a Krogan. Then there was the fake N7 armor"- another image of another stall, this one with a rather more flattering caricature of himself winking and giving a thumbs up- "No guilt whatsoever about taking that one down; a lot of people could have gotten hurt. You get the general picture."

Jerro shut off the hologram. "Most of the owners folded after a cease and desist, the rest after some aggressive posturing towards a lawsuit. I doubt the argument would have held up in court, but it never had to get that far. The only one that got past me was a vid by Eridani."

" _Citadel._ I think I saw that one," Shepard said. In fact Tali had sat him down and made him watch it with her, and had spent the entire time complaining about the unrealistic depictions of the Normandy's systems. "That one wasn't exactly unflattering though. Just bad."

"I get paid either way," the lawyer said with another roly-poly shrug. "After that, of course, you were discovered to still be alive fighting collectors and my contract defaulted from the shell company to you. They didn't seem terribly surprised. So I've kept on, but it's mostly been quiet. There was an incident a year ago where multiple stores on the Citadel were found using the same obviously faked endorsement from you-"

"Yeah, about that-"

"-But up until now nothing has actually required your attention," Jerro finished. "Didn't help that you spent most of that time undercover, under house arrest, or unconscious. Then one day I got fifty blips on my radar all at once, and I realized that this is the big one."

Hackett smiled. He seemed to be relaxing a bit more now that the deadly truth had been revealed. "You don't know what it's like to get a video call from an irate volus," he said. "He didn't even have his pressure suit on. I just saw a blob of flesh yelling about copyright infringement."

"Those contracts _were_ all illegal," Jerro said reproachfully. He pulled up another document, and for once Shepard understood it: this was the standard enlistment form for the Alliance navy, which he himself had signed all those years ago. "The Alliance has the right to use of Shepard's likeness for clearly-defined recruitment advertisements only. I couldn't sit by with my 'only unflattering depictions' rule and let that happen."

"So none of this stuff is going to market, then?" Shepard said, holding up the can of cola. He noted that the ingredients list included "raw courage". Against himself, he found himself chuckling at that. This really wasn't that big of a deal.

Hackett suddenly seemed gloomy again. "If I had my way, yes," he said. "But we're still recovering. And it would look really, really bad if we suddenly bailed on three dozen different contracts, no matter how illegal."

"So what are we going to do?" Shepard asked.

"I've talked to a lot of representatives, and the path forward seems pretty clear," Jerro said. "Under the circumstances, most of them are willing to re-negotiate. You review the contracts. Any you think are truly offensive we can nix, the rest we re-do except legally. The only downside is that there's a lot of reading involved."

"How much reading?" Shepard said.

Hackett paused, and silently walked out of the room. He immediately walked back in, carrying a footlocker. He dropped it on the foot of Shepard's bed; tilting him forward slightly.

"Let's get to work!" Jerro said cheerfully.

Suddenly Shepard didn't find the situation nearly as funny.


	2. Chapter 2

The vending machines were all perfectly stocked. It was a marvel.

Tali'Zorah vas Normandy stood staring at the rows of sterilely-lit junk food while the machine cheerfully spouted audio advertisements at her, and tried to remember if Shepard liked the green ones. She hadn't been able to see him this morning and had decided on the way up that she should make it up for him somehow, but there weren't a lot of things to buy in a hospital. There was a gift shop, but Shepard already had plenty of books and he was even worse at keeping flowers alive than he was with fish. That left the rows of calorie bloat she was staring at right now.

Surely they couldn't be bothering to ship all of this in from off-world. Maybe the Reapers hadn't bothered destroying the centers of production for candy and potato chips. Or maybe all the jokes she heard humans make about their junk food were accurate and all of it had simply survived the attack.

She broke eye contact with the cartoon sun on a packet of chips. This was going nowhere; she really couldn't make an informed decision considering she had no idea what any human food tasted like. And sadly, there was no N7 Cola. Best to just head back to the gift shop. Maybe it would surprise her.

She was not prepared for how much of a surprise she got.

* * *

Tali stormed into Shepard's hospital room. She was not in a blind rage. "Blind" would imply she was likely to miss something she aimed at.

She glanced around, looking for targets.

"Hey, Tali," Shepard said. Tali blinked, and realized that he wasn't laying in his hospital bed, but sitting upright in a chair over by the window, holding something from the crate of documents Hackett had brought in. _Oh, good for him_ , she thought briefly, until the desire to hit something with a stick returned.

"Lawyer!" she exclaimed.

"Here," Jerro said, from the corner where he had parked his desk.

Tali walked over him and thrust the tablet she was holding in front of his face. The volus took hold of it gingerly in his pincer-like hand.

"Oh dear," he said evenly. "They got that one to market rather quickly, didn't they?"

The volus was staring intently at the screen, which showed the cover of the book Tali had just bought:

 _ **STRANGERS IN THE ARTIFICIAL NIGHT**_

 _Commander Shepard's Tale of Love Found, Lost, and Regained_

The rest of the cover was dominated by an image of a muscular male human in Alliance uniform with his arms around the waist of a female quarian who, her forehead being obstructed by her helmet, was pressing the back of one hand across her faceplate. The scene seemed to be taking place in the cockpit of a spaceship, which was inexplicably looking over a field of green grass.

"What is it?" Shepard said, craning around in his seat.

"You don't want to know," Tali said gravely.

"Oh come on, I certainly do now," Shepard said.

"I was worried about this," Jerro said, staring deeply into the glazed expression of the human model. "I've been thinking, and I'm pretty sure Admiral Hackett did you more harm than good by waiting so long to tell you about all of this. Even so, I never expected this one to be out so quickly. They must have written it in under a month."

"Written what?" Shepard said.

Tali sighed, grabbed the tablet out of Jerro's hand, walked over, and dropped it into Shepard's lap. He picked it up and burst into laughter.

"You think it's _funny_?" Tali said.

"Kind of, yeah," said Shepard, wiping a tear from one eye. "Embarrassing, sure, but also funny. Maybe it's all the painkillers." He started scrolling though the pages. "Besides, you laughed at the soda."

"The soda was _silly_ ," Tali said. "And they hadn't sneaked that out to stores without telling you."

"Yeah, a month for writing and publishing... 250 pages. I have to admit that is impressive. They must stamp these things out on a template," Shepard said. "Maybe it's a VI."

"I thought you were renegotiating!" Tali said, turning back to Jerro. "You said he could cancel the contracts he didn't like!"

"Apparently the publisher's legal team didn't send out a memo fast enough," Jerro said. "Or they figured the profits off the book would be worth the legal fees. In legal matters it can be hard to tell the difference between incompetence and cunning."

"'A heart-throbbing tale of love triumphing against prejudice and catastrophe alike'," Shepard said, reciting from the book's summary. "'Commander Shepard was a man nearly broken by pain, by suffering, by the scorn of the galactic public. He thought the only way to survive was to close himself off from everything but his mission. He never wanted to let himself love someone- and never expected to love someone from another species.'"

Shepard glanced up at Tali. "Did I do something to annoy these people?"

"Keep reading," Tali said icily.

Shepard scrolled forward. "'But when he took on a quarian engineer, the quiet but headstrong Tona'Konn nar Blanc'- Wait, who the hell is that?"

"I don't know!" Tali said. "We don't even have a ship called the 'Blanc'! I checked!"

"They were given the rights to Shepard's name and story. Not yours, Miss Zorah," said Jerro patiently. "But it's somewhat common knowledge that he's in a relationship with a quarian, so they apparently decided to take some creative liberties."

"Convincing the galaxy that he's in love with somebody who doesn't exist is a 'creative liberty'?" Tali said.

"Not that it's any consolation, but that's not the only thing they got wrong," Shepard said, nose to the tablet. "Skimming through this, it appears that I'm piloting the Normandy. Also I think this Tona'Konn person is the protagonist."

"If you've ever wondered why even vids based on true events have that 'any resemblance to actual persons or events is coincidental' disclaimer, this is why," said Jerro.

"So what are we going to do? Can you get this taken off the market?" Shepard said, looking up.

Jerro punched a few keys on his terminal. "Well, the contract was and is still illegal, they definitely knew that by the time this went out, and it's easy to prove both of those things. So a lawsuit would definitely end well for you, and you could probably get the court to have the book pulled from shelves. But..."

"What but?" Tali said.

The lawyer tapped the side of his helmet with one hand. "I have a feeling that news about the heroic Commander Shepard publicly trying to cover something up would get far more eyes on it than a bad romance novel would. People would wonder what the problem was, because that's what people are like. And a book that might have sold fifty thousand legal copies would instead get a million illegal downloads," Jerro said. "It's a phenomenon every volus lawyer is taught in school, called 'Getru Syndrome', named after a businessman who tried to hide his name from the general public. You notice the irony."

"Do you think the publisher knew about this?" Tali asked bitterly.

"I'm guessing they were planning on it," Jerro said.

Tali shook her head. "So if I'm getting this right," she said. "We have the option of either renegotiating the contract like planned and letting them keep selling, or making it so this absolutely everybody reads this damn thing."

"That's about it," Jerro said, clasping his hands together.

There was silence in the hospital room.

Tali tapped one foot uncomfortably. She had realized a way to improve the situation. But it was one she still didn't like, and so she didn't want to vocalize it at once just in case Shepard suddenly shouted "I've got it!". At least if it was somebody else's idea she could blame them.

"The guy on the cover doesn't even look like me. He looks kind of like James," Shepard said.

Tali slowly walked over and picked the tablet out of his hands. "These things are connected to the extranet," she said. "Jerro. Do you know if they can set new editions of the book to automatically update?"

"That's the way most publishers work, as far as I know," Jerro said. "Old versions are archived but almost all readers default to the newest. But I know what you're thinking, and I doubt they'll edit out Commander Shepard's name without a legal battle, and that just leaves us with Getru Syndrome."

"I figured," Tali said. She handed the tablet back to Shepard. "Okay. When you draw up the new contract, I want one of the conditions to be that I get to rewrite the damn book."

Shepard, to Tali's satisfaction, did not laugh, argue, or goggle in disbelief. He just looked up at her. "You really want to do that?" he said.

"Under a pen name," she said quickly. "And believe me, if there were a way to just destroy every copy I'd definitely go for that. But in the meantime, it can at least be a semi-accurate bad romance."

"You're going to add yourself in?" Jerro said. "I mean that's more royalties between the two of you, but you're not dealing with fine art here."

"I don't want the dashing Commander Shepard falling in love with any quarians other than me," Tali said, putting one hand on his shoulder. Shepard reached up and patted it affectionately

"Besides," she said. "If I fill the first fifty pages with completely accurate technical descriptions maybe I can drive off a few readers. It'd be nice to set the record straight on some other things too. Like, why does everyone think the Normandy's stealth systems make the ship invisible to the naked eye?"

"Beats me," Shepard said.

"It'd be important to mention why we can't use the stealth systems while going FTL," Tali said, looking off into the middle distance. "Or why the SR-2 had so many more problems with atmospheric entry. Or why its shields had such an odd power draw ratio. Or why-"

"You should be writing all of this down," Shepard said. "Just ask Hackett before you start leaking military secrets."

Tali nodded, and sat down in a chair beside him. The sounds of her furiously typing on her omnitool filled the evening air.


End file.
